The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (27 page)

Looking back at the events of 1988, the field’s most publicly turbulent era, it is strange to imagine how much anger Jack the Ripper provoked in people. Today, opinion seems more circumspect, although it is certain there are still those who, if given the right opportunity, will be happy to dive headlong into the fray and remind us all that, by giving the murders attention, we are glorifying sexual violence, trivializing the lives of the women who died and ignoring real issues. As that now seems to be a rare occurrence, perhaps academia has finally saved ‘Ripperology’ from being filed away with other subjects in the box marked ‘lunatic fringe’.

Should one feel disposed to walk the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields on any given night, at any time of the year, one will invariably pass a guided Jack the Ripper walk. Within a minute of passing the group of avid listeners, it is very likely that you will encounter another, or be caught in the path of a large crowd of chattering students being led to the next site of interest by their guide. Sometimes, Mitre Square is packed with tour groups and Goulston Street can have so many that the only way to continue is to walk in the road. Each guide is in the flow of their narrative, the passer-by catching small soundbites of royal conspiracy, descriptions of mutilation or the name of a familiar suspect. What is apparent is that these guided walks are massively popular and do good business; they are truly a phenomenon and are the biggest manifestation of the continuing fascination with Jack the Ripper today.

The concept of visiting the Ripper’s murder sites is not a new idea; in fact, it is as old as the murders themselves. In the aftermath of each crime, hundreds of curiosity seekers would assemble at the scene of the latest tragedy to see for themselves the dreadful places, perhaps to catch a glimpse of congealed blood between the flagstones or to find out the latest news and gossip. Following each subsequent murder, crowds would gather at the most recent location and all the other murder sites that had gone before. As if to prove that
such curiosity knew no bounds, following the murder in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street residents of neighbouring properties would profit by ‘renting’ out the windows that overlooked the yard to anybody willing to pay a penny to see the place where Annie Chapman met her end at the hands of ‘Leather Apron’, as he was then known.

No other murder case has so much emphasis on ‘place’ as the Ripper crimes. Some of the names of the murder sites, such as Buck’s Row and Mitre Square, are almost as well known as the names of the women who died there. Only 10 Rillington Place, the slum house in London’s Ladbroke Grove where serial murderer John Christie executed hapless women, has as much infamy. But the house, and Rillington Place itself, are gone. The streets where the bodies of the victims of Jack the Ripper once lay are still there, much altered, but still accessible to the curious. The fascination with Ripper’s London began with the first press descriptions of the murder sites and continues unabated today.

In 1890 the
Pall Mall Budget
published a lengthy article entitled ‘Murderland Revisited’,
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a piece conducted in the form of a journalist’s self-guided walk. Many newspaper reports contained detailed descriptions of the murder sites as the murders were happening, giving the reader a sense of the ‘scene of crime’, but this particular report was retrospective in tone and could be seen as one of the first documented examples of exploring the Ripper’s territory in the aftermath of the murders. Although he did not visit Dorset Street, the writer went to Buck’s Row, George Yard, Hanbury Street, Mitre Square, Berner Street and Castle Alley. As well as describing these places in terms of their visual appearance and atmosphere, the author mentioned incidents that occurred during his visits and a little of how the events of two years before had
instigated changes, or not, as the case may be. But the
Pall Mall Budget
journalist was not alone in his perambulations, for within a short time, the residents of Buck’s Row became so frustrated by the undeservedly mean reputation of the street that was perpetuated by the continual visits from curiosity seekers that they petitioned to have the name changed. The Metropolitan Board of Works originally could see no reason to do so, but eventually capitulated and on 25 October 1892 renamed the thoroughfare Durward Street.
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It remains the only name change directly influenced by the notoriety of the murders.

The year after the
Pall Mall Budget
article was published Canadian journalist Kathleen Blake Watkins was sent to London and ventured into Whitechapel to visit the Ripper sites, leaving a grim account of her experiences there. Hanbury Street was described as ‘a foul, stinking neighbourhood where the children are stunted little creatures with vicious faces’ and Miller’s Court was accessed via ‘an arch reeking with filth’.
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There she met ‘Lottie’, the current occupant of Mary Kelly’s old room, who had trouble speaking owing to the broken nose her husband had recently given her. Watkins’s passing mention of black stains on the wall of room 13 suggested that Mary Kelly’s bloodstains were still evident after three years. Fifteen years later, a group of distinguished gentlemen from the Crimes Club were taken around the murder sites by Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, accompanied by three detectives; among the attendees were the noted coroner Samuel Ingleby Oddie, writer and critic John Churton Collins and one Arthur Conan Doyle. Together, they made up what could questionably be regarded as the first
organized
Ripper tour.
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By the late 1950s and 1960s, Ripper authors were still fortunate enough to be able to speak to elderly members of the
public who remembered the murders or who could recall their parents talking about them. Authors like Daniel Farson and Tom Cullen were often offered to be taken to the sites by these residents, as if they too realized the importance of the locations in the story. Farson, a noted photojournalist as well as writer and broadcaster, seemed particularly taken with the area and took photographs which would ultimately appear in some of his books. At the end of ‘Autumn of Terror’, Cullen produced his own brief equivalent of ‘Murderland Revisited’, creating a highly evocative view of a 1960s Spitalfields still seemingly under the Ripper’s pall:

It is wandering around the area at night, when the garment factories are empty and the loading bays at Spitalfields Market have shut down, that one feels the presence of Jack the Ripper. At night Commercial Street is now so silent and deserted that in passing Christ Church one fancies that one can hear the death-watch beetles gnawing away at the fabric of this, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s most noble spire. On the corner is the Ten Bells pub where Mary Kelly used to stop by for a quick gin. Standing outside as a customer pushes through the saloon bar door, one listens for the ghostly laughter of Mary Kelly and her sisters in trade. But no, the Ten Bells at night is now quite sedate. Its customers are respectable working-class types who linger long over a pint of beer. An air of stagnation hangs over the entire district. Somehow one feels that Spitalfields is cursed, that this is unhallowed ground.
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With the old residents of the East End slowly passing away, 1970 saw the advent of the true organized Ripper tour. Keith Baverstock, an Australian liaison officer for a travel agency who was interested in the more unusual sights of London,
created several different tours which aimed to take the walker away from the more hackneyed London tourist destinations and even included one devoted to unusual public conveniences. Baverstock’s project eventually became London Walks, and the Jack the Ripper tour was his first walk, taking place in August 1970:

‘The head had nearly been cut off, and the body had been disembowelled. And I don’t know if anybody here is squeamish, but certain parts of the female anatomy had been removed,’ the guide said with relish, yesterday afternoon. The crowd of about 30 pressed happily closer, anxious to have their flesh made to creep. This was that most curious of English Sunday afternoon entertainments, a trip for tourists around Whitechapel in the bloodstained footprints of Jack the Ripper, fee 5s, children under 10 free. Footfalls echoed uneasily in the memory, hurrying footfalls of a tall man in a dark cloak wearing a top hat, carrying a black bag, and hiding something long and glinting silver beneath his cloak.
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Baverstock also took visitors to Rillington Place, which would remain standing for one more year. Whether these crime-based tours attracted criticism is not clear, but the following year Baverstock was reported as saying that his tours were not morbid and that he would never conduct tours around more modern cases.
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This declaration demonstrated a peculiar dichotomy in that most murders, particularly recent ones, or those where the perpetrators were caught, were ‘out of bounds’ and yet Jack the Ripper was considered acceptable. The mythology of Jack the Ripper had pretty much won over, and he was now folklore, harmless fun from the world of foggy Victorian melodrama.

Those curious members of the public who had chosen to take Keith Baverstock’s Ripper walks in the early 1970s would be the last to see many of the locations as they once were. Slum clearance programmes had seen to it that in a very brief period of time George Yard Buildings, 29 Hanbury Street, parts of Mitre Square and Durward Street had disappeared, and the redevelopment of the East End was seen as being a major threat to the success of Jack the Ripper tours. Guides began to find it increasingly difficult to ‘recapture that sense of melodrama on a site overshadowed by a multi-storey car park or concrete office block’.
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London Walks had by that time been joined by London Unlimited; however, such was the pessimistic outlook that the latter was forced to close. The
Daily Telegraph
joined eighty tourists on their last tour in August 1974, believing it had attended ‘the last Ripper ramble’.

But the draw of Jack the Ripper meant that there was still a story to be told, and a good one at that. Unperturbed by the disappearance of key locations, surviving tour companies continued their walks, and throughout the early to mid-1980s the industry began to grow. Companies like City Walks and Footsteps realized that a Ripper walk was essential to their business. Often starting at Whitechapel Underground station, many of the tours would take in the less central locations such as Durward Street and nearby Wood’s Buildings. The former Buck’s Row was at this time entirely derelict, and the overpowering gloom of the area complemented the public desire to be ‘spooked’ by the ambience of the Ripper’s London. Wood’s Buildings, a narrow, urine-soaked alley, was the perfect atmospheric place to recount the activities of the prostitutes, as well as supplying customers with the appropriate menace.

Jack the Ripper tours came under a fair amount of flak during the centenary protests, but one imagines that the centenary
itself would have contributed so significantly to the success of these walks that the industry would have been too strong for the protestors to take down. So many people really did want to visit the East End and hear the Ripper story in its original context, or at least an atmospheric and entertaining version of it, and so a cycle of supply and demand was instigated. By the end of the 1980s enough companies were operating to make the continual night-time presence of such large groups of tourists a cause for concern. Spitalfields, which for so long had been run down and neglected, had begun to undergo a change, as the old Georgian houses of Fournier Street, Wilkes Street and Princelet Street were slowly being bought by wealthy professionals, the new owners gradually restoring the houses to their former glory. The rejuvenation of Spitalfields as a place to live, rather than just a place to toil, was gradual at first, but the incoming residents of this once maligned and neglected area of London would make their opinions heard and pose a potential threat to the Ripper tour industry.

The centenary furore did little to quash the abiding fascination with Ripper’s London. The guided walks were flourishing and steadily gaining publicity. Tabloid journalism was enamoured of the concept of supposed Ripper experts taking hordes of excitable tourists around the East End and was quick to inject long-held fears into the proceedings, playing into the hands of those who believed (rather irrationally, considering the passing of a century) that, if the Ripper was never caught, then he must still be at large! ‘It’s not until you actually stand on the murder spot and hear the story once more, that you start to shiver and wonder if you should take a cab home …’
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And therein lay the success of the Ripper tour. These guided walks would promote the fact that the participant was ‘walking in the footsteps of the Ripper’ or ‘on the trail of the
Ripper’, perhaps following the scent as detectives would have done back in 1888. In other words, everybody had an opportunity of succeeding where Scotland Yard had failed. And visiting the murder sites, regardless of the changes, was part of that ‘ongoing investigation’. It is as though the practically non-existent scene-of-crime analysis of the Victorian police had left unfinished business and that visitors need to see these places to fully understand the context of the crimes. Of course, another obvious reason for the interest in the Ripper’s haunts is the fact that they are so accessible. Most of his victims were found in publicly accessible places, and even now, if one is so disposed, one can stand on the very spots where Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly met their terrible fates. And many who visit the East End on these guided walks also want atmosphere, the essence instilled into the Ripper story by so many books and films, but with the changes to the area it is not always a promise that is easy to live up to.

This emphasis on ‘sense of place’ could be considered as making these Ripper tours, like other tourist-centred walks, mass-marketed exercises in ‘psychogeography’.
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As with the numerous ghost walks of York and Edinburgh, the walker is seeking an appropriate feeling from the urban environment. The desire to have the places visited appear and feel just as they would have all those years ago is a strong one, sometimes leading to a sense of disappointment when that desire goes unfulfilled. Authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd have used Jack the Ripper’s London in their work, significantly so in the case of the former, whose novel
White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings
¹⁰
repeatedly brings the reader on to the streets, digging up old associations and myths. Parts of the narrative recount the author’s perambulations across Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and the names of the murder sites appear sporadically,
sometimes repeated mantra-like, showing us that the legend of Jack is always part of that particular urban context.